A lady never forms an acquaintance
upon the street, or seeks to attract the attention or admiration of persons
of the other sex. To do so would render false her claims to ladyhood, if
it did not make her liable to far graver charges.

2

"Waiting in public gets criminalised like loitering
with intent, vagrancy, soliciting, waiting for their backs to turn, lying
in wait ... There is something possibly very criminal about waiting ...
the potential of it, the open-endedness of it, the perceived threat of it
..."

3

For women, of course, this idea of waiting in a public
space is attached to the idea of being a 'public woman': the most likely
outcome of becoming a public woman is to become a prostitute.2 To be a prostitute
is to consort with known criminals as well as become attached to other criminal
acts and behaviours. . The woman's body is made available and criminalised
because she waits in a space which is not hers, in which she is out of place.

4

In public space, the woman is like a Sphinx, ostensibly
presenting more problems than she solves. She symbolises disorder and is
therefore a problem, an irruption and an ambiguity. "In the heart of
the ... labyrinth lurked not the minotaur, a bull-like male monster, but
the female Sphinx, the 'strangling one' who was so called because she strangled
all those who could not answer her riddle."1 The riddle is simply that
of her presence: of her sexuality, of her identity, of her 'unnaturalness'.

5

The Street Manners of a Lady

A lady never demands attention and
favours from a gentleman, but, when voluntarily offered, accepts them gratefully,
graciously, and with an expression of hearty thanks.

6

'Then there's the stranger ... ideas of menace and rescue.
It is the stranger who occupies our imaginations ... the stranger defines
waiting as mysterious, risky and possibly romantic. The woman is a muse
for the narrative. She is the necessary subtext for imagining the stranger.
It's a kind of obvious nonsense that women wait, but it has narrative potency.'

7

Through the stranger, we define our territories. We experience
borders, as well as escape routes. If strangers did not exist, we would
have to invent them. "And they are indeed invented, zealously and with
gusto, patched together with salient or minute and unobtrusive distinction
marks. They are useful precisely in their capacity of stranger; their strangerhood
is to be protected and caringly preserved. They are indispensable signposts
in the life itinerary without plan and direction. They must be as many and
as protean as the successive and parallel incarnation of identity in the
neverending search for itself."3

8

The space of strangerhood, the status of the stranger,
vascillates between binary poles which form the stranger within these limits
of reason, as palimpsest upon which the subject writes herself: "on
one pole, strangerhood (and difference in general) will go on being constructed
as the source of pleasurable experience and aesthetic satisfaction; on the
other, as the terrifying incarnation of the unstoppable rising sliminess
of the human condition as the effigy for all future ritual burning of its
horrors."4

9

The stranger cannot be contained by reason ­ outside
reason, formless. In waiting for the stranger, the woman who writes is exposed.
In writing the stranger, the woman who waits instigates a volatile process
of change. She poses a riddle, beyond the riddle
of her being there, waiting: "there is no writing which does not devise
some means of protection: to protect against itself, against the
writing by which the subject is [herself] threatened as [she] lets [herself]
be written: as [she] exposes [herself]."5 She covers her tracks
so that no one can follow her: so that no one can retrace her footsteps.
We know the fate of those who answer.

"What is man that the itinerary of
his desire creates such a text."6

Notes

1 Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx
in the City, University of California Press, Berkley, 1991, p 7